Examination of Witnesses (Questions 780
- 795)
WEDNESDAY 23 JANUARY 2008
MR JEREMY
WALKER, DR
PETER RYDER
AND MR
TIM FARR
Q780 Chairman:
You can reflect on that while I ask Mr Walker.
Mr Walker: One instant reflection
would be that it is possible to use the local levy—indeed,
we do this as a matter of principle with the committee in Yorkshire—as
a form of leverage to bring in other people's money. That is very
effective.
Q781 Paddy Tipping:
One of the things that Pitt acknowledges and you acknowledge is
that there are a lot of players in this field. The Pitt solution
seems to be at a national level with Defra taking on a greater
leadership with the Environment Agency having an enhanced role
and having wider powers. What I am not clear about is where do
your organisations fit in under Pitt?
Mr Walker: In some ways it is
not surprising that he does not mention Regional Flood Defence
Committees because he was looking very much at the operation of
the incident and the response to the incident and the lessons
you learn from it. Regional Flood Defence Committees are not involved
in incident response. We can learn lessons from it too—and
so we do—but we are not directly involved in that part of
the process. We support the notion of the Environment Agency having
a stronger co-ordinating and strategic overview role; that makes
a lot of sense. Sir Michael Pitt's report does not say much about
the regional level at all and there is a role to be played in
terms of bringing together at the regional level because catchments
go well beyond local authority boundaries; they are not always
coterminous with regional boundaries but there is not a bad fit
in many catchments. There is a role to be played in bringing together
the bottom-up bit with the top-down bit and we can do that. There
is an issue around bringing local accountability to bear a bit
more on the Agency at the local level and we can also in other
practical ways work with local stakeholders to make more local
things happen. In the round there is quite an important place
for that regional sphere. Before I leave that, we talked a lot
about planning earlier on in the session and I would not want
to overlook the regional level here either. Following the Treasury's
sub-national review of economic development we should consider
the responsibilities of Regional Development Agencies who will
be taking on overall strategic planning for the region. We will
be arguing certainly that we need to look at adaptation issues
to climate change in that process, including of course flood risk
management and how we take account of that in the way that regional
strategic planning is done.
Q782 Paddy Tipping:
One of the problems is that Mr Farr's area does not fit in with
the government offices by any means. You also mentioned, Mr Farr,
earlier on the notion of the Water Framework Directive and river
catchment base and the planning for that. How do all those mesh
together? What is your role in that?
Mr Farr: I think that really there
is an advantage perhaps in coming at this from an almost purely
catchment orientated approach. I have made reference also to the
issue of the Welsh border which is now more significant in many
respects, particularly in terms of funding and decision making,
than the catchment, but the catchment still exists as it always
has in terms of the carrier of the water. Therefore having that
perspective is actually very important. I think it is the natural
boundary and therefore it should be protected. It also means that
within that context you can produce some relatively consistent
decisions or at least approaches to water based issues and then
they get referred up to higher authorities who are either in a
position to take a political decision on it or a financial one,
but at least they are well-guided thereby. I would hesitate to
say that we should sit in total judgment but I think in an advisory
and part-funding capacity we have a lot to offer. I would just
add that the emergency planning officer from Newark and Sherwood
came to address us in our flood defence committee meeting earlier
this month about what initiatives they have taken since the summer.
It obviously went down really well; it was entirely appropriate
and picked off this point about local people getting more engaged
in the whole issue of flood management and flood risk management
particularly. Also, with the majority of local county councillors
on it, you find that it resonates with them, they take up the
point and away they go and these initiates spread further and
wider. There is an engagement with all the local authorities through
the RFDCs which brings the Agency—which is a body which
tends to be more closely associated with policy and the local
authorities are closer to the grounds of the issues there—and
links them in a sort of intellectual capacity in terms of taking
arguments forward and allows the debate to take place.
Chairman: Colleagues, I am going to cede
the chair to David Lepper as I have to go and represent the Committee
on a committee that represents all the select committee chairs.
My apologies that I will not be able to hear everything you say,
but I can assure you I will read the transcript with keen interest.
Thank you so much for what you have already said. David Lepper
is in the chair.
In the absence of the Chairman, David Lepper was
called to the Chair
Q783 Lynne Jones:
I want to ask you about the performance of the Environment Agency.
I will start by addressing Dr Ryder because earlier you were expressing
concern at the lack of use of the broadcasting abilities of the
Met Office. Who were you criticising there? I know from some work
I did that there were concerns about the delay in both the Highways
Agency and the Environment Agency acting on the warnings on Thursday
19 July where they did actually hone in quite accurately on where
the flooding was and yet it was not until the next morning that
we had the flood defences caught up in traffic. What were you
getting at? If you were not getting at the Environment Agency
you need not spend too much time talking about it.
Dr Ryder: No, I was not getting
at the Environment Agency and I was not defending the Met Office.
What I was saying was that there is a problem which has been well
analysed by Sir Michael Pitt through the concept of surface water
flooding and the lacuna is that it is not the responsibility at
the moment of the Environment Agency and therefore the procedures
within the Environment Agency are based on the idea of measuring
water in rivers, watching the levels change, having models that
predict how those changing levels here will impact on levels further
down stream through the flow of the water. It is very much about
flooding from rivers. What we got this summer—we also had
it in that awful event at Boscastle too—was flooding essentially
caused by intense, prolonged, sustained and very localised rainfall.
What to do about that? To simply say that that is beyond our remit,
we cannot do anything and no warnings are issued, or actually
to do what I would like to see happen and that is essentially
by embedding the use of weather radar which actually tells you
the intensity of the rainfall over an area with a resolution of
a few kilometres, very close time to minutes as to when the rain
will fall, and because it is a two dimensional picture essentially
you can integrate the amount of water that has fallen on a catchment
of any size you wish down to the resolution of the radar. That
is not routine practice within the Environment Agency because
it is incidental in a way to their main business of forecasting
the evolution of the rivers. I think that is a weakness.
Q784 Lynne Jones:
Whose fault is that? Surely the Environment Agency has the ability
to say, "Look, we could take this into account, why don't
you let us" or "We're going to do it anyway".
Dr Ryder: They have not done those
things. They have focussed on the things for which they are essentially
responsible. It is not a matter for the Met Office to say, "And
as a result of this very intense rainfall falling on Boscastle
there will be flooding in Boscastle". No-one is doing that;
there is a gap. From the evidence that you have had and certainly
from conversations I have had with my ex-colleagues in the Met
Office and within the Environment Agency they say they much invest
more in the numerical models that will provider longer term forecasts
than these actual measurements. There is a difference between
a forecast that "Six hours ahead the rain will fall on Boscastle"
or "It is now falling on Boscastle, shall we do anything
with that information?" That is where I think more could
be done, but it does mean that you would be encouraging the Agency
to do that work even though it is not part of its formal remit.
I hope I will persuade the Pitt Review to see this as an interim
measure to be taken before the undoubted work that needs to go
on between the Met Office and the Agency, to do that job with
higher resolution models, the very thing that Sir Michael said.
Q785 Lynne Jones:
With the models that they have the Environment Agency could have
acted had it used the information from the Met Office. You think
it could have actually issued warnings even though it is not strictly
its job because it does have that ability?
Dr Ryder: I do. There is a difficulty
about it and that is that you would have to be prepared to put
up with a higher rate of false alarms, by that I mean an alarm
that flooding of this kind from intense rainfall was going to
happen but it might not.
Q786 Lynne Jones:
What is an acceptable amount of false alarms?
Dr Ryder: Can I take you to the
example of a gale warning at sea for ships? The objective there
is never to miss a gale because if you do people die. If ships
that are not equipped to be operating under gale conditions are
at sea people will die so you accept there will be false alarms
and there are many occasions when gales are forecast at sea and
they do not actually quite make it. That is viewed by the marine
community as quite acceptable because they have got used to that
idea. Any attempt to do this type of forecasting, this type of
approach would certainly need an educational programme, it would
certainly need an approach to the problem that was different to
the one that exists at the present time. I have not had this debate
with the Agency but this is probably why they are reluctant to
go down this route. I have had discussions about elements with
the Environment Agency but not at a corporate level. They are
reluctant to go down this route.
Q787 Lynne Jones:
Can I ask your colleagues about their assessment of the performance
of the Environment Agency and are there times when you have had
disagreements with them and how were they resolved?
Mr Walker: I would like to pick
out just one point on the Met Office as well which is that in
the last few days in Yorkshire to help us be able to see what
was likely to come in advance a Met Office expert has been sitting
in with the Environment Agency and working with the Environment
Agency forward planners. That has been enormously helpful in getting
a higher level of accuracy about when to issue warnings and so
on. On the subject of warnings, on the downside people responding
to warnings incur cost and inconvenience and so on—usually
one hopes very much for the best. But the risk of putting out
warnings which are not actually needed of course is the cry wolf
problem. If it happens repeatedly people will disregard warnings
and it is already difficult enough to get people to sign up for
the warning service and one does not want to do anything that
will put them off further. Moving onto your main question, I have
a very high regard for the performance of the Environment Agency.
We have many discussions, many about whether they are sticking
to budget, how they are deploying resources, how they are developing
their catchment flood management plans and, as we have indicated
already, sometimes there are frustrations about pace and so on
but not, I think, about direction. Perhaps just reflecting on
the lessons learned exercise which of course is your focus, one
area where I thought the Agency could have been sharper in the
summer in my part of the world was in its external communications.
It found itself with events moving faster than its ability to
respond so it was always dealing with the rumour and counter-rumour
and was not ahead of the game in getting accurate messages out.
By the time they had done that there were inaccurate ones in the
public domain and that is never helpful. As I am sure you know
in crisis situations communications are always very difficult
and can always be improved, but I think the Agency themselves
recognise that that is something they need to work on.
Q788 Lynne Jones:
I detect some disagreement; what level of inaccuracy in terms
of warning is acceptable? Would that depend on the nature of the
warning? If it was something you would only need to take minor
inconveniences that would make a difference or you could end up
doing a lot of very inconvenient actions to no avail.
Dr Ryder: There is quite a theory
about this use of probabilistic forecasts. Supposing I were to
say to you that the probability of your house being flooded is
10%, what should you do? What you should do in response to that
is to take those actions that would cost you very little but the
consequences if the flood were to occur would be very high. The
classic example is to move the children's photographs upstairs.
It costs you nothing to do that but if you were to lose those
in the flood the cost to you would be enormous. So there is a
theory, a proper thought through cost to loss ratio but I do not
want to bore you with all of that. I do want to get across, if
I may, the idea that there is an approach to this that is logical
and clear and it needs to be handled in those ways. As Jeremy
has said, you cannot do this without an educational programme
so how must we take it forward? We must take it forward with a
strategy that is going to exist for years and not try to do it
overnight. Against myself and my technical background to all of
this, that is a very legitimate reason for saying we should not
try to do it at the present time because we have not explained
the background of what we are trying to do and the limitations
of what we can do. You asked us to try to give an example of an
area where there was some scope for improvement and that is what
I have tried to do in that specific area of forecasting.
Q789 Patrick Hall:
I would like to follow up on Dr Ryder's fundamental point about
forecasting and what is measured by the Environment Agency which
I think is perhaps more significant than how the Agency runs its
media operations. Am I misunderstanding what you said in your
evidence to this Committee about flood defence committees actually
not only advising the Agency but having power over the Agency,
determining each year the local three year business plan, approving
the programme of work and monitoring their performance? Does that
not mean you have real power and therefore surely you have the
ability to get the Agency to listen to the points that certainly
Dr Ryder has been making.
Dr Ryder: This is a very difficult
question. I would be surprised if you had not picked up in the
comments that have been made earlier about the legal provision
for flood risk management or flood defence. It is within the law
that the Agency is required to fulfil its obligations in flood
defence through regional flood defence committees which is completely
out of line with the accounting officer responsibilities that
lie with the chief executive of the Environment Agency, who is
accountable to Parliament as an accounting officer. The ultimate
judgment as to the proper use of money within flood defences does
not lie with us, it lies with her. Over the recent years—and
I am glad to have the opportunity to describe this process to
you—we have clearly thought about this, we have discussed
it with the chief executive, we have discussed it with the chairman
of the Environment Agency, we have put proposals forward to them
to find a sensible accommodation, to live within at least the
spirit of the law but at the same time have a sensible working
arrangement which makes maximum use of the expertise that we have,
the local authority expertise that we have—each of the members
that are appointed by Defra bring some expertise to the party—and
I have to say the long experience of working. We are appointed
typically for three years and then another three years; I have
been a member and then chairman of my committee for ten and a
half years (a member for six years and four and a half years as
chairman) so we have that to bring to bear. What we do, as officers
in local authorities do, guided by the officers, is that we have
an oversight of the final programme that has been put together
that has actually been seen, acknowledged and approved up at headquarters
by the Environment Agency so they are comfortable and we accept
it. You might say it is more of an endorsement than an approval.
In that way we have some ownership for that programme of work.
I think there is engagement by the local authorities that they
have had an opportunity to scrutinise the programme in an informed
and professional way.
Q790 Patrick Hall:
And change it?
Dr Ryder: Yes, and change it indeed.
The other thing we do which is a recent addition is that we meet
once a year with the directors who are responsible within the
Environment Agency and look at the flood defence grant in aid
allocation that is to be made to the regions, the sub-division
that is to be made between the various functions that go into
flood risk management—the things I spoke of earlier, the
business of how much to go into development control, how much
to go into mapping, all those other functions—and we sit
down with them and listen to the rationale that they have put
together as a national authority and we agree or disagree with
them. We did that this year and, for example, we questioned quite
a bit the amount of money that was going into maintenance. We
were not entirely persuaded but we went through the arguments
with them and became persuaded. We were not entirely comfortable
with the amount of money that was going into flood forecasting
and warning for the very reason that we recognised the severity
and importance of this issue because of the surface water problems
we faced this year. Our feeling was that we should be spending
more money on this but then it was explained to us that the intent
was to use this coming year as a period to revisit the flood forecasting
strategy within the Environment Agency and we could expect higher
expenditure in years two and three of the comprehensive spending
period. So again we had a much closer understanding of what was
in the minds of the directors and eventually the board of the
Environment Agency and were able to support that line, which I
know the Agency board was comfortable with and appreciated that
we had scrutinised this, again independently, as with a degree
of expertise in the way I have explained. I am sorry if that sounds
a rather complicated way of doing this work but that is practically
how it is being done at the present time. I have to say that on
behalf of us all we are very comfortable that that lives with
the spirit of the law as it stands but it is also pragmatic and
sensible and we feel deals with our accountabilities, particularly
downwards to the communities that we serve, but also enables the
chief executive of the Environment Agency to satisfy her accountabilities
as accounting officer.
Q791 Mr Drew:
The problem with giving people information that actually proves
to be alarmist is that I now have people who sit at home waiting
for the flood. In the first session I was asking Sir Michael about
planning and the implication for flood plains and so on. I wonder
if you would want some greater authority—indeed powers—to
be able to say, as Lynne was saying about Lyon where effectively
the French have red demarcations which means "do not build,
this is not acceptable"; is that where we should be going
in this country, where we should have a much clearer identification
of areas where we should not build or which we should allow to
flood because that gives us that level of protection for those
areas that we really want to protect.
Dr Ryder: I have spent a fair
bit of time looking at PPS25 and its implications not just where
it is now but also future implications for surface water flooding,
the kind that was so worrisome this summer. I have to say that
my personal answer would be the same as Sir Michael's was and
that is essentially to give PPS25 time. I think it is a much stronger
situation now; things were getting better about controlling development
on the flood plain where that was dangerous previously and this
has only strengthened that. I am sure that as parliamentarians
you will look at this issue again once there has been an opportunity
for PPS25 to do its job because it is well thought out. The practice
guide for PPS25 is not yet fully written but it has the hooks
within it to do many of the things that I think are causing you
the most anxiety.
Q792 David Lepper:
There does seem to be general agreement about this. What do your
colleagues think about it?
Mr Farr: In response to the question
about the role of the RFDC within the Environment Agency, at the
regional level Peter explained in real depth the situation as
far as the chairmen representing the regions at a more central
point, but the reason the Environment Agency staff do take the
Flood Defence Committee seriously because they regard it on the
positive side as a form of public approval and at that level they
do not always get want they want. Sometimes they are told, "Sorry,
we are not agreeing to that; you will have to go away and think
about that again" so it does actually work, particularly
at the regional level which I think is where the thrust of the
legislation was designed to put it. In terms of performance I
think again there is approval for Sir Michael Pitt's position.
I actually think that the Environment Agency is particularly strong
in its strategic overview rules, there are some very bright people
who spend their time in many cases creating formulae which allow
very fair decisions to be made; even if people do not like them
at least they know how and why they have got to that position.
I think that is important but there are pieces missing there and
obviously surface water flooding is one and I think the more the
role of the Agency can be expanded in that respect to make it
more complete and broaden it, then so much the better. However,
I would say that I would like—and I know others feel this
way—to see them try to set themselves at least a target
to spend as much as possible on the ground rather than through
the office. I appreciate that is necessary and quite likely what
Sir Michael Pitt will generate. It is going to make it almost
impossible for them to achieve that in the short term but in the
longer term in the public interest, seeing things happen in your
area, is a far more important result of the Agency's activities
in flood risk management. I would like to see that happen; it
has drifted the other way recently and I think that that should
be redressed. There is no criticism of performance but I think
there is a sense of setting them an objective that perhaps they
not always look closely enough at.
Q793 Paddy Tipping:
Dr Ryder, you talked to us a lot about the notion of local broadcasting
and the fact that local broadcasting becomes more reliable nearer
the time.
Dr Ryder: Yes, it does.
Q794 Paddy Tipping:
The essential problem is that we do not understand the relationship
between the weather and the natural environment and the built
environment because our understanding of geophysics is not detailed
enough and presumably we need to do more work on that to be able
to understand the relationship and take the necessary action.
Dr Ryder: It is a huge problem.
If you take a pan of boiling water it is easy to predict that
the pan will boil but it is not at all easy to say where each
individual bubble will be and depending on what you are trying
to get out of the experiment is either important to you or it
is not. That is why in a way winter time flooding generally, as
it has been this year, by and large caused by widespread meteorological
phenomena with broad scales, against the summer flooding which
is intense convective activity, sometimes tide features on the
land, sometimes just randomly occurring just like the bubbles
in the boiling pan. I am very optimistic. I think the direction
which Sir Michael Pitt mentioned and I know the Met Office have
put into their evidence that higher resolution models is the right
way to go.
Q795 Paddy Tipping:
Mr Farr made an important point about doing things on the ground.
One of the things that comes out of the Pitt Review is a greater
enhanced role for the Environment Agency, maybe around forecasting,
maybe around flood alert. Given that the budget for the Environment
Agency now looks pretty firm from the first of April, is there
enough money in the pot to enable them to take on this enhanced
role?
Mr Farr: That is a very difficult
question. I suppose you could say there is never enough but at
the end of the day they are structured to prioritise within the
Agency to make difficult decisions. If I could add to what I said
a moment ago, I think the corollary of an enhanced central strategic
role should be a greater devolution of some of the spending decisions
to the regional and local situations. I would pick out particularly
the distinction between capital and revenue in that respect. I
think it is right that for the sums of money involved and the
nature of the projects that spending on capital projects is made
centrally. I think that is reasonable, no matter how disappointed
people are in regions that their particular area does not get
done, I think that is an important means of managing the capital
quantum, given that, as we have talked about local levy before,
you have those local opportunities to pick up the pieces where
you see fit. I think in terms of revenue spend, particularly of
the maintenance budget here, I feel that the Agency would be better
advised to leave a degree of fluidity in the means of spending
to local bodies or bodies with whom they have some authority so
they are not exactly handing the money over with no strings but
allow them a degree of latitude because I think—and this
comes back to Mr Drew's comments about internal drainage boards—sometimes
on the ground you find you have to make difficult decisions but
they tend to be slightly instinctive but fundamentally reactive.
Sometimes those decisions cannot be made a long way from the point
of impact and I also think that it is not necessarily productive
to try and work to meeting targets when it is more about achieving
the art of the possible. If you see a problem you might have to
make a difficult decision but at least you have next year to catch
up. I think that rolling management programme is better suited
away from the centre with the right management controls being
applied to handing over the money. That, I think, is an area where
the Agency will probably find itself having to go because there
is too much to do when you start looking at every individual bubble
as Peter Ryder just said.
David Lepper: Gentlemen, can I thank
you for both your written evidence and your evidence to us this
afternoon. I will say, as Mr Jack when sitting in this seat always
says at the end of a session, if there is anything else that you
wish you had said to us that suddenly comes to mind afterwards
then please do write to us about that. Unfortunately we cannot
change anything which you have said. Thank you very much.
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